In the book of St. Mark 5:25
onwards, is laid a classic story of a woman with an issue of blood, who made a
resolution to call it ends by touching the helm of our LORD JESUS CHRIST. The
story is quite old but best reflect the situation in which the nation is in.
The nation has an internal bleeding situation which demands immediate
intervention, should odds go to our favour. The disturbing fact with internal
bleeding is that no one sees it, and as a result no one controls it, unless you resolve to do something about it. The pain is internal and out of
reach for our nearest neighbour, unless one yells out. The treatment is
complicated as it demands a careful surgical operation, with attention to
detail as life and death is pinned to it. Seriously, our nation needs God’s
intervention. I believe if our leaders could diagnose the pervasiveness of the
problems, they would stop playing games, put on the gloves and knife, and start
working out on our sickness.
We have a twin problem spelled
out in one word, ‘inhumane’. Malawian’s long standing reputation is currently
under stake subject to the increasing corruption cases and murderous reports on
people with albinism, all for the hunt of the old bucks! All these are
symphonic to moral delay and over-westernization. One cannot put pieces
together on how we have metamorphosed into what we are today. I will only
imagine, the very principles of humanity that have slowly been offloaded with
the euphoria of democracy gnashing its jaws on our very conduct. How ironic
that the nation that lodged over one million refugees from 1978 to 1986 cannot
lodge its own endangered citizens from manslayers. How ironic that the same
nation laments the killing of its citizens in foreign lands, Mozambique and
South Africa, and spends over MK300 million for their repatriation, cannot
create safe houses for its 10,000 population of endangered brothers and
sisters, whose only crime is their deprivation of the protective skin pigment, melanin.
The brutal witch-hunt for our
beloved brothers and sisters born with albinism has been systemic and
orchestrated by ambitious and lucratic networks too pervasive to be detected by
our law enforcers. So far, by the time of publishing this blog, 17 people with
albinism had been murdered in cold-blood, 66 additional people born with
albinism abducted without trace, we can only assume the worst, and 28 others
have been denied ‘resting-in-peace’ in quest of the millions their bones and
body parts can award. Mathematically, the country has been merciless to over
111 bodies of people born with albinism, whose parts have been distributed to
places, bargained and sold, without any conscience, in search for a dollar. As
if that is enough, many of them have suffered insults, dubbed names, such as ‘mobile
money’, ‘walking corpes’ by vendors in our townships and suburbs. This trend at
which things are unfolding is an exact duplication of the Rwandan genocide,
with a slow motion button placed on remote control. Photos of bones, body parts
and all are shared on Whatsapp, and yet, the law-enforcers are simply providing
assurance of a better day. The nation has turned too savagery reminiscent to
the depictions of ‘The Lord of Flies’ novel which exposes the animalistic
passion of a human heart. I have always doubted whether a man would on his own
volition abduct another person without having established a market opportunity
elsewhere. I have no word to describe the fate and the reputation we have
carried abroad for our reluctance to curb this stench once and for all. On one
occasion an officer was reported to have connived with murders to offer them an
escape from the arms of the law at five hundred thousand Malawi Kwacha
(MK500,000), a development which is quite lamentable and very inhuman. We
probably have for long disregarded our friends born albinism as less humans,
and denied them their right to life. I don’t believe that this brutal surge
against people with albinism is born out of poverty, but I have all reasons to
believe it as a result of our evil passions, cushioned by the lust for money
and value-eroded culture. We have turned into beasts, probably worse than
beasts.
The government must act and act
now. The president’s call for ‘shoot on sight’ is highly applauded and more
should be done. If we all mobilise ourselves in search for these networks, we
can kill the plant at its bud. If all our border districts were heavily
secured, and whistle-blowers could be placed in strategic positions, we could
have dealt this issue once and for all. If we can eliminate the myths in our
minds that riches come through the abductions and murders of albinos, and if we
can all collectively work to combat this evil among us, I see Malawi rescuing
itself from the present peril. The sentences that the courts are producing
against the perpetrators of these barbarous acts are both provocative and
unconvincing. They are an expression of
whether justice is the vision of our judiciary or not. In one case, a convict
was sentenced to ‘four’ years for trading with bones of an albino and another
case a magistrate sentenced to 17 years two convict for murdering albinos,
dismembering their bodies and conspiring to trade them for a fortune. Putting
each other in perspective, Bernard Madoff, a former Nasdaq chairman ‘conman’
was sentenced to 150 years for swindling over 65 billion dollars through fake
policies and products. A Former Mayor of Blantyre City, John Chikakwiya was
sentenced to three years and two months for stealing 6,000 dollars meant for
road construction, yet a former Principal Secretary in the Ministry of Tourism,
Triza Namathanga Senzani, bagged a decent three year jail sentence for
swindling over 100,000 dollars through the same Malawian courts. Even after the
same courts had sentenced Steven Monjeza, a two year sentence for stealing a
phone, and a seven year sentence to a Form Four student for forcing sex on his
girlfriend who was a minor. Surely, there is something intrinsically wrong with
our judiciary system! I need to be schooled on how these sentences are arrived
at. There are countless examples of double standards with our courts and should
this continue I stand back but wonder whether it is justice or something else
being pursued by our judiciary system.
If the government wishes to curb
this malpractice, then I believe that the government must necessitate that
sentences given by our courts against those who commit such heinous acts are proportionate to their acts. The murderers are worse than human beings, in
expression of one Comrade Mugabe, when you reach the level of butchering
another fellow being, dismembering his or her breasts, head, limbs, and other
private parts for economic gains, you cannot qualify to be called a human
being. In other words, we oftentimes demonize the former German Nazi Third
Reich, Adolf Hitler, who for a schizophrenic driven agenda, systematically
exterminated 6 million Jews, for their hair, golden teeth and national pride,
but history will have no mercy on us categorizing us as merciless as Hitler if we
do not deal with this evil once and for all.
To pin it together with the
corrupt practices in our justice system, where law enforcers shield
perpetrators at a fee and where the courts give lenient sentences to
convicts, is beyond our imagination. As a nation, we surely are bleeding from
inside, and the longer we caress this internal bleeding, the greater the
chances for a national fatality.
